For this Expert Voices blog, we spoke to Diana Skelton, Head of Giving Poverty a Voice Programme at ATD Fourth World, on her work supporting people experiencing poverty and the intersection between experiencing poverty and contact with the family justice system.
Can you introduce ATD and your work?
ATD—All Together in Dignity—Fourth World is a movement against poverty and for human rights. We are led in inclusive governance with people living in deep poverty. Our members come from diverse social and cultural backgrounds. What unites us is our approach: continually seeking out people who are the most isolated by persistent poverty. In any low-income community, some people are dynamic; however, we seek out and join people who feel completely trapped by deep poverty. Then, together, we choose our priorities to build bridges between people in poverty, other citizens, and decision makers.
We work here in the UK, as well as internationally and with the United Nations. In the UK:
- “Together in Dignity” is our family support programme. With time, space, and resources, vulnerable and excluded families build upon their strengths, develop their support networks, and can access public services in their community. Through our advocacy work with families in crisis, we foster conditions that allow parents, children and professionals to better understand one another and collaborate.
- Our “Giving Poverty a Voice” programme empowers people with experience of poverty to express their views and offer solutions to the problems affecting their lives, while offering policy makers an invaluable insight into overcoming poverty from the bottom up.
Our newest publication, Joyful Revolution: Poverty, Social Justice and the Story of Mary Rabagliati, is the biography of one of our co-founders. It includes situations in family courts, both historically and in our present-day work. We also have a publication with a specific focus on human rights: Volume 2 of Artisans of Peace Overcoming Poverty, which focuses on people in poverty influencing a national anti-discrimination law in France and helping to shape the UN’s Guiding Principles on Human Rights and Extreme Poverty.
What are the biggest challenges people facing poverty encounter in the family justice system?
Living in poverty makes it much more likely that families will be subjected by children’s social care to harsh interventions. These interventions are discriminatory. They are driven by a concept of risk-aversion that is inconsistent and also fails to fully consider the harm done by removing children into State care or contested closed adoptions that permanently sever relationship among siblings and with the entire extended family. Young people who experienced these investigations as children—whether or not they were removed from their families—say that interactions with children’s social care (including in the family justice system) damaged their sense of identity and their trust in authority figures. In 2022-25, we gathered evidence about these issues in a project led by people with lived experience collaborating alongside practitioners. This is the final report prepared with parents; and our Youth Voices project prepared its own report here.
How could the family justice system better support people experiencing poverty?
Policies should be amended in order to move away from the current aim of trying to negate risk to children and away from viewing this aim as separate to family support. Instead, policies should refocus on meeting needs of families so that parents can provide for their own children. This means offering access to the material and social resources needed to function and thrive, rather than breaking families apart. Specifically, a legal duty should be placed on local authorities to provide timely and accurate needs-based assessments and support within a human rights framework when families reach out for help. Child welfare policy and practice should shift towards working with families to identify and meet their needs.
The UK Government pledged (in the 2024 Labour Party manifesto) to enact Section 1 of the Equality Act, which is the socio-economic duty. The statutory guidance for this duty should prescribe anti-poverty practice training to be delivered by people with lived experience of poverty for the family justice system, children’s hearing panels, police, the National Health Service, school/education staff, social work staff, and all supporting services that make referrals to social work.
Kinship care, unless contrary to the best interests of the child, should be pursued at all available opportunities and those wishing to undertake this model of care should be adequately supported. Adoptions should no longer be forced when parents contest them, and in all cases, closed adoptions should be ended, as recommended by the President of the Family Division of the Courts and Tribunals Judiciary, Sir Andrew McFarlane. Legislation should be amended to make open and voluntary adoption a legal presumption unless there is clear evidence that it would be an unsafe option.
What value do partnerships with organisations like CJI bring to practice development work?
You have a crucial focus on valuing the participation of people with lived experience in designing effective practice innovation and policy; and organisations like ours that are led by lived experience rely on partners like CJI whose relevant learned experience can ensure that those innovations will actually be implemented!
How do you ensure the voices of people with lived experience remain central?
When individuals experiencing poverty choose to get involved with our Giving Poverty a Voice programme, we start by offering them the opportunity to join a peer group of others with similar experiences. We know that epistemic injustice occurs when people suffering from oppression are denied the tools and opportunities to make sense of their own experiences. That’s most often the case in deep poverty. There are so many ongoing crises, either in your own life or for your extended family or community that it’s very rare indeed to even get the time to take a step back to get your head around these experiences. So part of our process is forming peer groups where each person can:
- first have time for individual reflection to develop his or her own thoughts;
- then exchange with peers who may think differently about similar experiences;
- and gradually develop mutually supportive relationships where each person can expand upon, consolidate, and also challenge their own thoughts, as well as formulate their own questions.
This step among one’s peers creates a strong foundation for people in poverty to contribute their most rigorous thinking. It also challenges the ways that society and the media tend to individualise poverty as though it results only from “bad personal choices” and not from disempowering systems, structures and policies.
What is ATD’s goal for 2026?
ATD Fourth World recently developed a new tool for the Inclusive and Deliberative Elaboration & Evaluation of Policies (IDEEP). The goal of IDEEP is to provide a framework that decision-makers—and anyone developing evidence!—can use to recruit strong involvement of people in poverty in the design, implementation and assessment of projects or policies that have an actual or potential impact on them. The IDEEP tool builds on a long-established methodology called the Merging of Knowledge. IDEEP also incorporates a new set of questions based on research co-led by ATD Fourth World and Oxford University on the Hidden Dimensions of Poverty. The goal is to ensure that anti-poverty policies and programmes take those hidden dimensions into account to become more impactful and effective. Right now, we are looking for partners who would be willing to trial this IDEEP tool with us, so that’s an open invitation!